


The Portrait

by TheSaddleman



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief, In-between episodes, Memory, Painting, Romance, Spoilers for Episode: s09e10 Face the Raven, Spoilers for Episode: s09e11 Heaven Sent, angst cavalcade, fear of forgetting, prologue to Heaven Sent, what happened after Face the Raven, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:46:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23613238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSaddleman/pseuds/TheSaddleman
Summary: After Clara faced the raven, the Doctor found himself in his own personal hell. Set before the events of Heaven Sent, we learn one way he coped through endless cycles of death and rebirth and how he kept Clara's memory alive for billions of years.
Relationships: Twelfth Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald, Twelfth Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald
Comments: 13
Kudos: 24





	The Portrait

**Author's Note:**

> This story was started, and then put aside, more than a year before it was uploaded. When it was announced that Heaven Sent would be featured in a worldwide "tweet-a-long" event during the Covid-19 lockdown in April 2020, I decided to complete the story, which is a more serious tale than I've written in a while. As noted in the summary, this takes place at some point between Face the Raven and the start of Heaven Sent, and reflects various theories about how the Doctor's prison worked, and how and why a portrait of Clara came to be created. Some of the ideas set forth here reflect statements made by Heaven Sent's writer, Steven Moffat; others are my own or are shared with other fans.

_The eyes_. Dammit, he still couldn’t get her eyes right. Everything else was in place, but her eyes—he just couldn’t capture her eyes.

“No, no, no,” the Doctor moaned. He knew this would be the last time he’d be able to work on the portrait; well, at least as this version of himself. Soon the punching would begin, then the burning, then the numbness, then the long climb, then “BIRD,” then … it would start all over again, as it had countless times already and would countless times again.

The Doctor looked around at the musty bedroom in which he sat on a stood, a large canvas perched on an easel in front of him, and an assortment of oil paints and brushes spread out on the bed beside, the wet paint from the brushes seeping into the quilt. A dusty fireplace sat directly behind him, its mantelpiece empty. At least for now.

You’d be forgiven for thinking the sharply dressed, grey-haired twelfth Doctor had exchanged his TARDIS for one of those castle bed and breakfasts property owners in the UK operated to help pay the bills—and was not, in fact, in a prison. A clockwork prison that frequently rearranged its interior layout, guiding the Doctor to … well, his death. Only, in this prison, death meant a reboot. Which made it more of a personal hell, especially when the prisoner’s memories were also reset; in the case of the Doctor, to the minutes after the woman he cared for more than any other soul in the universe was executed as he stood and watched, utterly impotent to save her. 

_Yeah, well we’ll see about that._

Despite the rebooting—which involved his previous self dying and a new copy created using a teleporter—not every cycle through the prison was the same for the Doctor. Most cycle, after days (sometimes weeks) of playing detective, of searching for answers, of trying (unsuccessfully) to fight off the grief, he had no idea that he’d been reliving the same days and weeks over and over. At least, not until he meditated over the word “BIRD” that he’d found traced into a pile of ash next to a skull laying close to the teleporter. Then, like a post-hypnotic suggestion triggering, the memories of every one of his times through the cycle would flood his brain, and he’d know what he had to do. And for how long. And, each time, it nearly drove him mad. If not for her.

But, occasionally (every few centuries? Millennia?), this prison-cum-personal hell would cut him a break. 

Was it random chance? A glitch in the system? A moment of mercy—or extra torture—imposed by his captors? Maybe whoever was observing him, waiting for his secrets to slip out (about the mythical creature known as the Hybrid, for whatever that was worth), was unionized and required to take a tea break every few million years?

On these occasions, the Doctor would begin a cycle knowing from the start why he was there, what he had done before, what he had to do again, and what he couldn’t do and shouldn’t waste time attempting. Basically, the same flood of information that he’d normally receive just before the punching began, he’d get the moment he arrived. And this allowed him to approach the situation differently, in ways he hoped would help those copies of himself that were still to come.

As the Doctor tried to get the eyes right on the portrait he was painting, he was in one of those cycles now. He called them “spoiler cycles.”

In these instances of temporal clarity, he knew one thing—no, never a _thing_ , he chastised himself, a _person_ —was always going to be the priority: Clara.

Always Clara.

It was around his five hundredth time through the cycle, back when each round lasted for months (it took many cycles before the Doctor figured out the tricks and exploits and timing that allowed him to lessen the interval between reboots), that the Doctor realized something that horrified him far more than the thought of effectively spending eternity alone and grieving in his own personal hell.

With each cycle, he was forgetting more and more about what Clara Oswald looked like. Her voice. Her laugh. Her eyes. The scent of her hair that he cherished on those rare occasions he got physically close enough to her to detect it. (Why didn’t he do that more often?) And those amazing eyes. 

It didn’t matter that each cycle technically began mere minutes after he’d kissed her hand that final time before the raven took her away from him; each time a new “copy” of himself was created, it felt like a little bit of his memory of her was lost. It was gradual—but the loss was real and the Doctor eventually realized what was happening. After all, anything copied enough times, no matter what it is, begins to degrade eventually. And every time the Doctor experienced a reboot of his existence, a little something was left behind. As someone who often voluntarily deleted unnecessary memories as a form of mental housekeeping, he knew this wasn’t on the same level as deleting Harry Sullivan’s phone number from 1975 (or was it 1985? 1995?). He was losing feelings, impressions, senses. 

What the Doctor feared the most was that, eventually, all he would remember of Clara was her scream. Her cry as the raven struck before she collapsed like a beautiful marionette falling to the stage with its strings cut and the puppeteer that breathed life into the creation equally as dead on the floor behind the curtain. That scream was the first thing he thought of every time he stepped out of the teleportation chamber, his grief renewing each time. 

The Veil—the silent, shuffling, implacable hooded creature that pursued the Doctor endlessly through the corridors and rooms of the castle-like prison—was supposed to represent the Doctor’s bad dreams. In truth, it really didn’t. His real nightmare was losing his good memories of Clara.

He wanted to remember Clara smiling, hugging, laughing at his bad jokes, making bad jokes of her own, gazing with wonder as he unveiled to her yet another new planet or nebula, and proving that it was impossible for anything to be boring when the two of them were together. _That_ was Clara. And _that_ is what he wanted to remember of her … especially if his plan failed. 

It was a plan he never allowed himself to dwell upon, but knew he had to follow—for as long as it took. He could do the math to calculate how many times his fists would need to strike the twenty-foot-thick wall made of azbantium located in Room 12 before he would break through to whatever was on the other side. And the math was terrifying. Not just in terms of the sheer amount of time he expected it to take—but in terms of whether there would be anything left of his sanity when he finally punched through. 

It made sense for the Doctor’s prison to be well-stocked with provisions, even if it was just variations of tomato soup, something he swore never to eat again if he ever made it out. After all, it would be embarrassing for his captors to have their only prisoner starve to death before they got what they wanted, with no guarantee his next incarnation would be any more amenable, assuming he even allowed himself to regenerate. 

He always chose to burn instead, of course. Not that he could regenerate by that point in the story, anyway; the Veil (which the Doctor deduced on Day 1 was a form of automaton, clockwork-driven like the rest of the place) was designed to deliver killing energy of a type that, while not instantly fatal (probably by design, maybe in hopes of them provoking a deathbed confession?), destroyed his ability to regenerate. This perversely pleased him; he didn’t trust anyone else—not even another incarnation of himself—to do what he was trying to do. This had to be on him. Twelve and Twelve alone.

So his captors providing food made sense. The fact a full set of art supplies also kept renewing itself? Less so. An easel, canvases, oil paints, a sheaf of blank white paper with pen and ink, even a small assortment of wooden frames cut to the exact measurements of the canvases, was always waiting on a table in the dark corner of the bedroom with the fireplace where he inevitably found himself near the start of each cycle and returned to repeatedly, having made it his home base of sorts. Maybe they believed the confession they sought might someday seep out through artistic expression? Maybe his captors were frustrated art gallery owners needing to fill up an exhibit? Did his brother, Irving Braxiatel (eponymous purveyor of the universe-famous Braxiatel Collection), have anything to do with this? Useless questions, but then the Doctor thought (at first) that the art supplies were as useless as that rake he kept finding in the corridor outside the transportation chamber upon his arrival.

So, first few dozen times through the cycle, the Doctor ignored the supplies. He wasn’t going to play their game and draw pretty pictures or write a haiku. Hey, how about a short story? 

_My best friend is dead. Someone is going to pay. The End._

Using that term, “best friend,” to describe Clara felt more powerful than others he could have used to describe her. No, that’s a lie; there was one other. If he hadn’t been such a coward about it, he might have been able to use a more powerful term, but he never got the chance to give Clara the ring he’d bought for her weeks earlier with that idea in mind; it now sat in a small box in his TARDIS that was left back on Earth, likely forever orphaned (both the TARDIS and the ring, unless his plan worked). 

The next few dozen cycles through the prison, the Doctor used the paints and a canvas to write out a list. It was a list inspired by binge-watching _Game of Thrones_ with Clara that one visit when she decided that the two of them deserved a “staycation.” A young girl in that TV show (who looked not too dissimilar to the immortal named Ashildr, who he indirectly blamed for Clara’s death) had created a list of the people she planned to kill in revenge for the death of her father and other friends. 

The Doctor’s list consisted of all the names of Gallifrey’s High Council he could recall, as he had no doubt as to who was responsible for his imprisonment and for Clara Oswald’s death. A to-do list for later. _Much_ later. 

_Clara said I shouldn’t take revenge. I don’t always listen._

Of course, he wouldn’t have followed through with anything “terminal.” Just as he would never have actually brought the Cybermen and the Daleks down on Ashildr’s Trap Street. For one thing, they might have done unchecked damage to London and the rest of the world. But primarily he would not have because Clara had asked him not to.

_Sometimes, I need someone to stop me. Clara stopped me. She’s been taken away from me. And this is not Earth. Who’s going to stop me now?_

Still, eventually realizing that the threat implied by the list of names was an empty one and its only value was as a memory exercise, a later “spoiler cycle” Doctor tried something else. 

He took one of the canvases, a piece of charcoal, and drew a big hand with the index and middle fingers forming a V, the back of the hand facing the viewer. Then he drew another, and another, until the canvases were used up, at which point he moved on to the paper, and he spent hours placing them around the castle. The incongruous TV monitors that were dotted around the place—the only evidence of modern technology—were probably being monitored, so he made sure the pictures were visible (even though be damned if he could find the actual cameras). It felt oddly satisfying, if a bit childish.

 _What’s wrong with being childish? I like being childish. And they don’t even have iPlayer._

The Doctor quickly grew bored of this childishness, however.

He did eventually come around to the idea of writing poetry. Not haiku, as it turned out, but a rather morbid poem about death that he inscribed into a wall in the corridor near where he always emerged from the transportation chamber. A consequence of one “spoiler cycle” rendering the Doctor in an even darker mood than usual.

For reasons he didn’t care to investigate, some locations within the prison did not reset after every cycle (or after the castle “rotated” after the Doctor offered the Veil a confession, which usually required the Doctor to do some soul-searching inside the TARDIS he recreated in his mind as a storm room—unless he was on a “spoiler cycle,” in which case he just recited them from memory). The exterior stone wall in that corridor was one such place that persisted, so the poem also persisted. Much to the Doctor’s embarrassment; Dylan Thomas, he was not.

He also took advantage of “spoiler cycles” to leave himself clues, again in locations he determined through trial and error would not reset, to shorten his time in the dial and get him to the point of punishing the wall quicker. Not that he really was looking forward to how each cycle ended. But the math showed he could trim a few thousand years off if he was able to get in a few extra punches from time to time.

_Remember, you’re doing it for her. Duty of care._

Of course, none of these hacks and exploits ever made the unstoppable Veil, well, stop. And it didn’t dissipate the Doctor’s loneliness one bit. Yes, Clara was there with him, in his mental TARDIS storm room, talking to him, keeping him company, even teasing him from time to time. He would feel her cool, soft hand cupping his cheek as she always, always admonished him to find a way to win. 

Her voice would give him strength. He knew what he had to do. And he would do it for as long as it took if it meant they could, maybe, someday, be together again. 

But it wasn’t the same as having Clara actually by his side, for real, something that, despite enduring more than two thousand years of lives, he couldn’t imagine ever not being the case.

And then came the time when the Doctor realized that Clara’s face was starting to become less distinct in his storm room—almost soft-focus. Her voice sounded slightly hollow. In fact, it almost sounded like someone else’s voice at times.

This he could not allow. He had to find a way to retain her memory. If he ever did forget, she would be lost to him forever. The bastards in the funny hats would have won, even if he never told them about the Hybrid. And everything he had endured this far would have been for nothing.

So the Doctor set about preserving his memories of Clara by painting her portrait. He’d done that once before, painting an image of her Victorian incarnation, Clara Oswin Oswald, in a previous lifetime when he was casting about time and space, convinced that he would eventually find his Impossible Girl.

That portrait had been idealized, romantic. This time, the Doctor wanted to paint the most accurate, photo-realistic image possible, before too many more cycles degraded his memory. He hoped that having a visual cue would help keep those other memories—her laugh, her voice—alive in his mind. Every pore, every imperfection (what few there were) would be there—everything that made her unique. _Those eyes._

Painting also made him feel like he was accomplishing something other than writing lists of names or drawing crude gestures when he wasn’t hunting through the castle looking for Room 12 or leading the Veil to the far end of the prison to buy him the roughly hour and a half he needed in order to do everything else before it caught up with him again and the merry chase resumed.

His efforts actually began too late in some respects—even with the portrait, in whatever state of completion at the time, refreshing his memory of her whenever he began the cycle, Clara’s voice eventually fell silent in his storm room, replaced by neatly printed messages on a blackboard. And he no longer saw her face, at least not very often. To a degree, his companion had truly become a ghost to him.

_We’re all ghosts to you._

Except … right at the end. After “BIRD” reminded him of everything, and right before the punching, before the burning, before the numbness … right as he lost all hope, she’d be there, talking to him, stroking his face again, those amazing eyes that seemed to inflate when she was emotional, telling him to “get up off your arse and win.” 

And he would. Or, at least, he would punch and endure the pain of destroyed knuckles before the Veil delivered its own torture, but he would survive long enough to make the climb back to the teleportation chamber where he would finally die, only to reboot himself and start the cycle all over again. He knew he had millions, if not billions more punches to throw before the azbantium wall finally collapsed. And even then, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t find _another_ wall beyond it, twice as thick and made of an even harder substance.

_The High Council would probably call that the funniest joke in the universe._

The Doctor had no idea how many cycles it took him to get to the point in painting Clara’s portrait where all that was left was getting her eyes right. He was grateful to have found a place to keep the painting that was one of the locations that did not reset, so he didn’t have to start over each time. The bedroom the Doctor called his home base, it would reset; the stargazer lilies that sat in a glass vase by a window, illuminated by an unknown sun (Gallifrey’s?), were always fresh and crisp whenever he returned to the room. But the portrait? The mantelpiece, like the wall with the poem, and the room downstairs where the Doctor left his next copy a set of dry clothes (which had required him to endure what he referred to as his “streaker cycle”), was one location that persisted. And so the portrait of Clara, as long as it was left above the fireplace, remained in whatever state it was when the Doctor last saw it. And, despite not having a note pleading, “Please finish me,” left next to it, the Doctor was always drawn to try and finish the work.

During one “spoiler cycle,” the Doctor decided that the painting could also provide later Doctors with clues. He left his jeweller’s eyeglass next to the portrait to make it easier for the next Doctor to determine the painting wasn’t new (and, eventually, that it was very, very old).

_Clever Doctor. I live with this stuff, remember?_

He also added a clue to the painting itself, turning it around and writing “I am in 12” on the back of the canvas. But he instantly realized it was a wasted effort; he could never foresee a time when he’d ever turn Clara’s face to the wall. And writing the message on the front of the image, he felt, would have given his rebooted selves false hope that Clara herself might be in Room 12.

_Then again, maybe she is?_

If the Doctor’s captors expected to get a confession out of him through art, they didn’t get what they were looking for. Instead, they got a vivid portrait that showed them who he had lost, what she had meant to him, and why they should all be very, very afraid about him ever getting out of the prison and back to Gallifrey. 

He was grateful for one thing, though, because the portrait served an unexpected, but welcome function. Whenever he saw it for the “first” time, not long after arriving into the cycle and his first encounter with the Veil, and his first outbursts of anger at his captors, seeing Clara’s face calmed his mind. That allowed him to think, and plan, and prepare.

But still her eyes eluded him. Of course, the painting had eyes, but the eyes he’d painted so far didn’t have “Clara” behind them.

This portrait had to be _alive_. Or as close to it as possible.

The Doctor found that talking to the canvas as he worked on it helped get other details right. He’d tell “Clara” jokes and relate past adventures; sometimes he’d imagine she was watching him work. He could even feel her weight as she gently rested her chin on his shoulder. He didn’t want to look down to confirm she wasn’t really there. Or, worse, see nothing but blank void where her features should have been.

No amount of joking, of storytelling seemed to help him get her eyes right, however. With all the reboots he endured, one feeling persisted as consistently as the death poem in the corridor: frustration.

But then one cycle he heard her voice, not in his storm room, but next to him. And it startled him because it wasn’t time to start punching the wall yet. This far through the cycles, Clara never spoke to him anymore except just before he started to tell the Veil the story about the bird and the diamond mountain; a story he knew would take approximately four and a half billion years to complete. He interpreted Clara’s eleventh-hour appearance as if the neurons in his brain that held her memory were trying to conserve power by invoking her only at a time of greatest need. Maybe this was another one of those moments?

_Why can’t you see me, Doctor? Just see me._

In that moment, all concern about forgetting Clara vanished. He was looking right into her face. He allowed himself to be lost in her eyes, those brown eyes he always joked about being so disturbing when the absolute opposite was true. To remove any other distractions, he closed his eyes and just focused on Clara’s face, which persisted in his vision like a beautiful fatigue image.

After a few seconds/minutes/hours (the Doctor really wasn’t keeping track), the faint sound of shuffling from down the corridor outside broke the spell. “You bastard,” the Doctor muttered in the Veil’s general direction; even at its laborious, shuffling pace, it would be through the door in less than a minute. He opened his eyes.

He was looking at Clara. He had adjusted and coloured the portrait’s eyes perfectly with his own eyes closed. _This was Clara_. And he knew he’d now never forget her.

He dropped the paintbrush on the floor, knowing it would be renewed later, like most other things. But he was confident versions of himself to come—those not lucky enough to be doing a “spoiler cycle”—would not have the urge to “finish” Clara’s portrait (they may not even notice the art supplies in the corner anymore). Now the portrait could truly serve its purpose.

He turned to the door and waited for the Veil’s imminent arrival. Having foreknowledge of what was coming, the Doctor already had the second of his “confessions” ready to give the Veil so he wouldn’t need to take the long dive into the water this time around—just as by swiftly giving up the first confession in the corridor unlocked the bedroom quicker and bought him extra time before the Veil resumed its chase, giving him more time to paint. He mused that he needed to find something else to occupy his extra time, now.

He wouldn’t have to wait long before he would be able to punch the azbantium wall, each punch taking him closer to being with Clara again. After that … well, the next him would have to suffer through the uncertainty, the grief, the soaked clothes, and the occasional Veil-induced jump scare. And, he mused, he would need to find something else to occupy his (sort of) free time. Maybe a room he had not found yet housed knitting supplies?

As the door to the corridor outside began to creak open and the cloud of flies that accompanied the Veil began to fill the room with a teeth-clenching buzzing, the Doctor gave Clara’s portrait a quick look and a sad smile. He knew the next Doctor—the next _Doctors_ —would be left with a powerful reminder that he was not alone, and that he had a plan. A plan that had to work. 

It was the only way he’d get her back. 

_I’m going to get out of here, and I’m going to get my Clara back. And if anyone has a problem with that—to hell with you!_

**Author's Note:**

> The Doctor spoke about deleting extraneous memories in "Under the Lake." The uncertain dates following Harry Sullivan's phone number refer to the UNIT-era dating controversy (Harry, of course, was a companion of the Fourth Doctor and according to the writer of the Series 10 episode, "Knock Knock" was the grandfather of the character Harry from that episode).
> 
> Irving Braxiatel, the Doctor's brother, is a character from the Virgin Books novels and audio dramas, primarily those featuring Professor Bernice Summerfield. The Braxiatel Collection, however, is part of the TV canon, being first referenced during the Tom Baker era, while the Tenth Doctor does mention once having a brother in the episode "Smith and Jones". (It was also a longstanding fan theory that the Doctor and the Master were brothers based on a line of dialogue in "Planet of Fire".)
> 
> The reference to the ring the Doctor wanted to give Clara is a followup to another story of mine: "Instant Messaging: The Perfect Place".
> 
> The Doctor's first portrait of Clara can be seen in the episode "The Bells of Saint John".
> 
> Some of the italicized lines quote earlier episodes. "We're all ghosts to you" comes from "Hide".
> 
> The notion that "I am in 12" was written on the back of the portrait but the Doctor could never bear to turn her face to the wall comes from Steven Moffat in various interviews about the episode.
> 
> The idea of a "living portrait" comes from the Sarah Jane Adventures episode "Mona Lisa's Revenge". I originally had more discussion on this subject in an earlier draft of this story.


End file.
